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Happy Birthday indeed Ray.
Steve, I can only echo a tiny amount of your heartfelt piece there as I only met the great man once. It was in Chesterfield for one of those 'Evenings With.."events, but it was a lifetime's ambition and I was absolutely thrilled to meet him. He was my movie hero before I was in my teens much more than any actor.
http://www.chesterfieldtheatrefriends.co.uk/archive/2000s/2001/derek-pykett-presents-an-evening-with-ray-harryhausen.aspx
As you can imagine I took along a couple of items for him to sign including his Film Fantasy Scrapbook, which was the imprint that coincided with the release of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (the first hardback book I ever bought as a kid, after restamping the original at my local library so often it spent more time on my shelf than theirs!). However his reaction to the Intrada cd of the Jason and the Argonauts score was a bit of a shock, as he knew nothing of it!
A true cinema legend.
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Always enjoyed the scores to his films, especially 7TH VOYAGE onward. I met Ray on three different occasions, what a nice & friendly man. Managed to get some items signed each time, including one of my Colpix 7th VOYAGE lp jackets, the Cloud Nine Harryhausen CD, along with Film Fantasy Scrapbook and my FXRH collection. Saw the Harryhausen display at the Motion Picture Academy in Beverly Hills a few years back, and it was a day I'll never forget.
I got introduced to the concept of fanzines just a little too late in the day in the 70s when there was a British genre magazine called World of Horror. Back then I would have been jealous as hell of someone with an FXRH collection! I seemed to have missed it.
At this point I would never have dreamt that I'd get to meet him. I tried in 1980 and failed, at a convention set up by the British magazine Starburst. It was the same weekend I tried to squeeze in a Doctor Who con on the Sunday and my very first film music concert, Filmharmonic 80, on the Saturday evening. This left only daytime Saturday, and I missed Ray.
So the Chesterfield gig above being less than an hour's train ride away was a no brainer. And he brought along a number of models which he let us handle!! I mean, Medusa!! It was a pretty amazing evening.
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He was a big kid...a gentle, lovely soul with a lifelong sense of wonder that stayed with him until his death. His friendship made my own life a better place by his being in it. I loved him. I miss him. I was honored to be thought of as his friend.
Steve
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